Recognising this, new San Francisco Opera general manager David Gockley is championing free performances by the opera in the city's parks, and recently created "Opera Vision," a programme to simulcast live performances from the War Memorial Opera House. The performance is transmitted to an outdoor location where the public watches a six-camera video shoot projected on a large-format screen and hears the music on a system of Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers.
The first simulcast was for Madama Butterfly's opening night, which was also the opening of the opera's 2006 season. The event ended up as an immensely successful outcome to a technically ambitious undertaking. Madama Butterfly's premiere was watched by an estimated 8,000 people filling San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza, across the street from the opera house.
Meyer Sound's involvement in the simulcast was to be expected: the company, the San Francisco Opera, and Pro Media/Ultra Sound (PM/US), sound providers for the event, all have long histories with each other. The opera house is well stocked with Meyer Sound loudspeakers, in fact, the CQ-1 wide coverage and CQ-2 narrow coverage main loudspeakers were designed for it. (Other Meyer Sound models at the opera house include the MSL-6 horn-loaded high-Q main loudspeaker, PSW-6 high-power cardioid subwoofer, MTS-4A full-range main loudspeaker, UPA-1P wide coverage compact loudspeaker, UPM-1P narrow coverage compact loudspeaker, HD-1 high definition audio monitor, and a selection of legacy, unpowered models still in regular use.)
The scene at the opera house was intense during the simulcast. Modern opera production employs a surprising amount of technical infrastructure, but this event went beyond even that norm, requiring more than two dozen crew members for the simulcast alone, with Christensen and opera Audio Department Key Doug Mitchell anchoring the audio operation at the opera house. The video was captured by three manned cameras, one robotic camera, and two fixed "point of view" cameras, the outputs of which were fed to the opera's percussion room in the basement, designated as "Video Village," where director Bruce Bryant called the cuts on eight of the room's 55 monitors.
From there, the video was fed to a microwave uplink transmitting a digital stream and a backup analog stream from the roof of the opera house. The microwave signal was then bounced off of a nearby skyscraper and received by an antenna mounted on the back of the truck pulling the trailer on which the 18-foot, 7-inch by 25-foot LED screen was mounted. This was only the second time an LED screen was used in the U.S. for an opera simulcast.
The audio production seemed simple by comparison. The opera itself was picked up by only three microphones: John Meyer's modified Neumann USM 69 stereo condensor and two DPA 4023 compact cardioid condensors. "With respect to mic'ing technique, I'm of the view that less is more," Christensen comments. The USM 69 was suspended over the stage, while the DPAs were deployed as "foot" mics. Meyer's USM 69 has been modified to provide two bi-directional (figure-eight) patterns, as opposed to the traditional MS stereo combination of one cardioid and one bidirectional pattern. The mic fed a custom MS decoding matrix designed and built by Meyer.
Over at Civic Center Plaza, PM/US project manager David Bowers presided over
